by King, Danny
CLUNK!
Sebastian ran headfirst into something immovable. He didn’t see where it came from and didn’t have time to check his stride. He simply ran straight into it and ended up flat on his back.
Chen looked down at Sebastian and asked, “Going somewhere?”
The guys in the trees hadn’t seen him either. He was wearing mostly black so he was hidden against the night but he hadn’t registered on their infrared scopes either. He was, for want of a better word, invisible to their technology.
Only now, aided by Sebastian’s tumble, did Colonel Bingham actually see him.
“Jesus, where did he come from?”
18 was frantically fiddling with him heat detector and convinced it must be broken because he could still see only one red blob out there, that of Sebastian on the floor currently attempting to scramble across the grass and away from Chen.
“Cold body, sir! Cold body. It’s him. It’s our target!” he confirmed.
This nugget of intel was overheard half a mile away on a dark and gloomy dirt track by a dark and gloomy man who went by the name of Larousse. He wore a military uniform and military insignia but he was not a military man himself. He also wore a cross and carried a bible but he was not a preacher either. Nobody knew his first name or believed Larousse was really his last. In fact, nobody really knew anything about him except that he paid the bills. And he paid them very very well.
To Colonel Bingham and his men Larousse was an enigma, but to himself he was a modern day crusader, one of the chosen few (otherwise known as the Synod), ready to use his power and wealth to fight the good fight and purge mankind of an evil that had stalked it since Adam and Eve had been ejected from Eden.
Of course, up until now, it had all been largely theory. In the ten years the Synod had been operating in the UK, the luckless Larousse had never once managed to track down a single genuine target. Others on the Continent and further afield had been more successful but Larousse was still on a duck – and a very expensive duck at that.
But now, finally, with all of his forces in the field and the element of surprise still on his side, he finally had one. He had fulfilled his vow. Now all he had to do was make the kill.
It was enough to make his voice tremble as he radioed Colonel Bingham at the front.
“Is it him?” he said, momentarily forgetting to release the speak button. “Colonel Bingham? Colonel Bingham? Do you have a visual confirmation of our target?”
Bingham keyed the handset twice, as was standard procedure when a target was too close to talk but in his excitement Larousse had forgotten the code and kept barking at the Colonel to reply.
Chen strolled after Sebastian, just about far enough for Colonel Bingham to risk a communiqué, so he whispered into his radio: “Confirmed Mr Larousse. We have a positive sighting. The target is cold.”
The Colonel’s message was barely audible. It sounded more like a shock of static than an actual sentence but Larousse did make out the three key words “target is cold”.
Larousse clasped his hands together and gave thanks for being entrusted with such a sacred task. “I am, as always, your obedient servant,” Larousse muttered, crossing himself and catching several soldiers nudging one another in amusement.
They would see, he told himself. They would soon bow before the Almighty and recognise His authority on Earth, through the vessel of His apostle.
His divinity secured, all that was left was to give the order so he keyed the handset and told Colonel Bingham to go. “I am giving you the order, Colonel Bingham. Take the target down. On my authority, and that of the Full General Synod, go go go!”
Half a mile away Colonel Bingham rolled his eyes. Someone had been watching too much Ross Kemp. But there it was loud and clear, he had his orders.
“Roger that. Snatch team, on my mark, get ready,” Colonel Bingham whispered into his radio, relaying the orders to his men.
All around the treeline safeties were flicked to red and snare poled extended. The target was quick – very quick in fact – but the Unit’s bullets were quicker still.
“On my mark!”
Sebastian was still scrambling across the muddy grass with Chen strolling along behind him. Bingham couldn’t believe his luck. Their timing was perfect. They would make the kill when the predator was distracted making his own. This would give them best chance of a clean take with only a civilian’s death to mess up their paperwork. But he would be simply listed as collateral damage. The Colonel could live with that.
“Get away from me!” Sebastian was screaming. “I mean it. I don’t want to fuck you up but I will.”
Chen laughed, as did several of the guys in the trees. It was tragic the things people said when the end was nigh. Chen made a grab for Sebastian but Sebastian sprang to his feet and made one last desperate dash for freedom.
“This is it,” Colonel Bingham whispered into his radio. “On my count, three… two… ”
But Chen didn’t run after Sebastian. There was no need. Another arm appeared from out of nowhere and clattered him to the ground once more, this time knocking him out cold.
“Enough arsing about,” Boniface scowled. He had other places to be and was not in the mood for this cat and mouse shit.
18 was the first to see him and instinctively grabbed the Colonel’s arm to pull him back. “Wait sir, cold body! Second target!”
The Colonel felt his own temperature plunge a couple of degrees and grabbed the thermal imager to check for himself. Sure enough, there it was in red and black, Sebastian lying prone on the floor while two cold figures stood over him.
“Abort the grab! I repeat, abort the grab! Everyone stand down,” Colonel Bingham told his men over the airwaves.
Back at the rear, Larousse heard the order without having heard anything else and tried to countermand the Colonel.
“I said go! Take him down. Do it now!” he ordered, terrified that his date with destiny was slipping from his grasp with every passing second.
Colonel Bingham ignored Larousse’s demands and knew that his men would too. They answered to him, first and foremost. Larousse might’ve paid the bills but it was Colonel Bingham who kept his men alive to run them up.
“Colonel! Colonel Bingham. Have you gone yet?” a little tinny voice in Bingham’s ear was demanding. “Speak to me!”
But Bingham was about to speak to anyone. Or move. Or even breathe. Because the second target was suddenly looking their way.
“What is it?” asked Chen, looking at where Boniface was looking but seeing only trees. “Peter, what is it?”
“There’s something out there,” Boniface replied. He hadn’t seen anything and he hadn’t heard anything, but there was something out there all the same. He could sense it.
Someone else could sense it too and he felt Boniface’s eyes burning right into him. He made a dash for it, out of a dip and into the trees with the fear of Satan chasing after him.
“It’s just a fox,” Chen smiled, “out for his dinner, same as us.”
Boniface and Chen turned and walked back to the farmhouse, dragging the unconscious Sebastian with them as they went.
Colonel Bingham now breathed again. How close had they just come to disaster? One target in open ground would’ve been a challenge. But two targets in open ground – particularly when they’d only planned for one – would’ve been a quick way to an early grave.
“Let them get back to the house then we move in,” he told his men. “Second Squad move up in support.”
CHAPTER 9
Boniface dumped Sebastian in a chair and stepped back to jangle his change (his own, not Sebastian’s).
“He’s all yours,” he told them. He was happy to grab Sebastian off the hill but he wasn’t about to do the Duke’s dirty work for him – particularly not in this suit. It wasn’t just the expense but the inconvenience. There weren’t many tailors who were prepared to see their clients after dark and Boniface found midday fittings decidedly inconvenient.<
br />
The Duke looked at Sebastian. He was as good as dead already but he felt a pang of courtesy all the same.
“Rouse him. It’s only proper.”
Angel picked the flowers from a nearby vase and tipped the contents onto Sebastian’s head. “Wakey wakey, time to die.”
Sebastian coughed and spluttered and looked up to see seven horribly familiar faces smiling down at him once again.
“Alright lads, how’s it going?” was all he could think to say.
The Duke glanced at Vanessa but Vanessa hesitated, still reluctant to do the necessary. Angel has no such compunctions and grabbed Sebastian’s head to give it a spin.
“Alright mate!” she chuckled in response.
“No wait wait wait wait!” he screeched, his voice hitting octaves no man should be able to hit while still in the possession of testicles.
“Just a thought, but do we have any food in tonight?” Vanessa said. “Sebastian was asking earlier.”
Vanessa wasn’t entirely sure where she was going with this idea but it bought Sebastian a few more seconds nevertheless. Not that he was particularly grateful about it.
“Oh this just gets better and better don’t it!” he complained.
To which Angel could only agree. “It would be a shame to waste a meal.”
*
A similarly dramatic conversation was taking place in the trees beyond the farm. Colonel Bingham had got on with the job of redeploying his forces without consulting Larousse. There simply wasn’t time but Colonel Bingham was a seasoned campaigner and a specialist at reacting to fluid situations. In the armies he’d previously served (not all of whom flew flags you might recognise) he’d been used to using his own judgement to get the job done. All his benefactors had ever asked for were results and plausible deniability. The rest they were happy to leave to God and the ever-reliable Colonel Bingham.
His rank was one of pure fiction. He’d awarded it to himself seven years earlier after killing a Colonel in French Guiana. That had been a good job, lucrative and successful, and it had been the making of him in the private security sector. He’d returned to Europe with his reputation enhanced and a new rank and beret to match (the latter of which required dry cleaning).
But Bingham found that Larousse wasn’t like his past patrons. Larousse wanted to be there, on hand and at the kill. He thought his money bought him superiority but all it really bought him was the Colonel’s indulgence. This was no way to run an operation.
“Colonel, I demand to know what’s going on? I gave you the order to go so why haven’t you gone?” Larousse asked over and over again until the Colonel finally answered him.
“There’s a second target, Mr Larousse. It changes everything, over.”
Larousse’s heart skipped a beat at the news. They’d looked for one. They’d found two. It was a miracle. No, divine intervention. Larousse imagined the Synod’s reaction when he told them the news in the morning and sent them the ashes of both.
“Understood,” he told Colonel Bingham through the radio. “But it changes nothing. We have the resources for two so I’m ordering you to go. Over.”
“Father, this is a dangerous situation,” Bingham said, deliberately calling Larousse Father because he knew it got under his skin. “We need time to recce the house properly.”
“We don’t have the time, Colonel,” Larousse said, now even more desperate to get the job done before his bats flew their perch. “If the targets are in the house you need to take them down and now.”
“But Mr Larousse…” Colonel Bingham started saying only to be cut off by a buzz that indicated Larousse was pressing his talk button at the same time.
“Now Colonel! This is what I’m paying you for!”
*
The vote was a slamdunk. Seven for and only one against.
“Then it’s decided,” the Duke confirmed.
Sebastian put down his hand.
Angel yanked him back up to his feet with super-human strength and bared her fangs.
“No wait, you can’t eat me. I’m all fat and cholesterol,” Sebastian pleaded.
“And I’ve been so good all week,” Angel laughed, licking his neck and liking what she tasted. She couldn’t stand it when guys over-showered.
She was about to sink her teeth in when the front and back doors burst open and a dozen assault rifles gatecrashed the party. They completely surprised the Coven but not nearly as much as the Coven surprised them.
The soldiers sized up the eight targets before them. Who did they shoot first? Which posed the most danger? How did they grab them all when they’d only brought four snare poles?
Corporal Fenn, who’d been the first through the door, demonstrated a flare for understatements when he keyed his radio to say; “Colonel, we have a problem.”
Somewhere to his right, and with his hand hovering over the light switch, Henry could only agree.
“Oh Corporal, you have no idea.”
And then, with the merest flick of the switch, the room was plunged into darkness.
CHAPTER 10
Bingham watched on helplessly as the black farmhouse suddenly held an impromptu rave, with blinding strobe lights and a machinegun beat blasting out of every window.
“First Squad come in. 6 are you there?” Bingham was saying into his radio but 6 was already in as many pieces and looking down at his own legs from the chandelier above.
The gunfire lasted only five seconds or so and petered out as each weapon was snuffed. There was a final flurry of movement in the doorway as someone attempted to flee but he didn’t make it past the threshold and was dragged back inside with a short-lived scream and the slamming of the door.
Then, as if nothing had even happened, the farmhouse lay still and quiet once more but no one believed it now. The place had shown its hand. Death lurked inside.
18 was breathing hard, almost as if he had sprinted up the hill and away from the fight himself but no one was coming back from there.
Finally the silence was broken by a tinny voice in Colonel Bingham’s ear.
“Colonel, how many were in there? Over,” Larousse asked.
“More than two, Mr Larousse. More than two,” he confirmed. “First Squad over and out.”
Everyone heard the communiqué. And everyone knew where the order had originated. Larousse was on borrowed time. Then again, from this moment onwards, they all were.
“There are more of them outside,” Henry whispered to the others, holding one of the soldier’s earpieces to his own ear as he eavesdroppedin on their inquest.
Boniface crouched by the front window and looked up the slope and towards the line of trees. He should’ve trusted his instincts and investigated properly. He knew it hadn’t just been a fox out there he’d sensed. Bloody Chen. How had he let so many guns creep up on them?
“How many are there?” he asked.
Henry listened for a little longer but shook his head. “I don’t know. But they seem to be having the same conversation.”
“Okay, Colonel Bingham, tell Second Squad to move into position. You have my authority to go,” Larousse told the Colonel, turning his pencil around to rub the names of First Squad out on the map before him.
“Negative Mr Larousse. We’re standing fast. The situation has changed and we need time to reassess,” Colonel Bingham replied, directing the troops around him to spread along the ridge and plug the gaps left by First Squad.
“Captain Bingham, you may have the experience but I have the authority,” Larousse almost shouted, starting to lose patience having to give the same command again and again. “Now I am ordering you to take down our target. Right now. This instant!”
Bingham heard the radio crack between his fingers and eased up his grip a little. Tonight was going to be either a very long one or a very short one for all concerned. One way or another.
“Mr Larousse,” Colonel Bingham replied in his most measured tone to disguise the anger that was brewing up inside him, “you ha
ve just given out that order over a compromised radio channel. Now before you go sacrificing any more of my men – scramble to pre six. Over.”
Larousse went white when he realised his error. He felt someone’s eyes burning into him and turned to see the commlink operator turning away in contempt.
They blame me, he suddenly realised. But he wasn’t the enemy here. It was those creatures in the farmhouse. They were the ones who’d killed their comrades. They were the enemies of all creation. He was merely a soldier of God, sent here to fight the good fight –
– half a mile from the front.
*
“That’s all folks, they’ve just scrambled,” Henry told the other, dropping the earpiece he’d borrowed back into the sticky goo he’d plucked it from.
“Who are they?” Vanessa asked, frisking one of the dead soldiers for ID but finding only ammunition.
“I don’t know. But I’ve got a horrible feeling they know who we are,” Henry said.
The Coven were strong, collectively and individually, stronger than the strongest of men, with none – or at least few – of their mortal weaknesses, but their greatest weapon remained their anonymity. What was it that Charles Baudelaire had once said: “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he did not exist”? Or perhaps that was Kevin Spacey. Either way it was an astute line and one worthy of repeating.
“They’re here for us,” Henry concluded. “Only something went wrong.” He looked around at the snatch Squad and realised, “They didn’t expect all of us tonight, maybe just one or two.”
With this conclusion came the realisation that they still had the advantage. How much of an advantage he didn’t know, but he was fairly sure the entire British Army wasn’t waiting for them outside so that gave them a fighting chance.
Chen’s nose twitched. “Something’s moving.”
